Database systems support ever growing numbers of different technologies and transactions. From traditional database systems that support established technologies used to facilitate and track sales, inventory management, or other financial transactions, to highly optimized data systems that undergird a variety of different web-based or mobile applications, database systems must increasingly provide more efficient and durable performance in order to keep up with requests from database clients. Traditionally, database systems have implemented a variety of different recovery techniques to ensure that transactions committed by the database system are durably persisted, even in the event of a system failure. However, such recovery techniques oftentimes introduce additional processing and other operational burdens. Moreover, the added complications of recovery techniques may increase the costs for administration and maintenance of database systems. For database systems that deal in a high volume of access requests, often resulting in a less forgiving environment for coping with database downtime or failure, recovery techniques that are slow to return a database system to normal operational capacity further exacerbate the effects of database system failure.
While embodiments are described herein by way of example for several embodiments and illustrative drawings, those skilled in the art will recognize that the embodiments are not limited to the embodiments or drawings described. It should be understood, that the drawings and detailed description thereto are not intended to limit embodiments to the particular form disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, equivalents and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope as defined by the appended claims. The headings used herein are for organizational purposes only and are not meant to be used to limit the scope of the description or the claims. As used throughout this application, the word “may” is used in a permissive sense (i.e., meaning having the potential to), rather than the mandatory sense (i.e., meaning must). Similarly, the words “include”, “including”, and “includes” mean including, but not limited to.